This invention relates to ink jets, more particularly, to ink jets adapted to eject a droplet of ink from an orifice for purposes of marking on a copy medium.
It is desirable in certain circumstances to provide an array of ink jets for writing alpha-numeric characters. For this purpose, it is frequently desirable to provide a high density ink jet array. However, in many instances, the stimulating element or transducers of such an array are sufficiently bulky so as to impose serious limitations on the density in which ink jets may be arrayed. In this connection, it will be appreciated that the transducers must typically comprise a certain finite size so as to provide the energy and displacements required to produce a change in ink jet chamber volume which results in the ejection of a droplet of ink from the orifice associated with the ink chamber.
It will also be appreciated that efforts to create a high density ink jet array may produce undesirable cross talk between the ink jets in the array. This is a result, at least at large part, of the relatively close spacing of ink jets in the array.
When efforts are made to achieve a high density array, the ink jet transducers become intimately associated with the fluidic section of the ink jet, i.e., the ink chambers and orifices. As a consequence, any failure in the fluidic section of the device, which is far more common than a failure of the transducer, necesitates the disposal of the entire apparatus, i.e., both the fluidic section and the transducer.